Therapy for Addiction:
Chances are if you are reading this page you - or someone you love - is struggling with addiction. If that is so, then I am glad you are here. Please, take a moment, before you read any further, just to notice how much weight you carry in yourself around this experience. Notice your mind - possibly restlessly searching and unable to rest - your breathing - possibly shallow. Perhaps there is also a looming feeling of dread, like a lump of clay in the back of your throat or the pit of your stomach, around what is to come and around what has already happened. This experience is common to those who surround the addict. What's worse, as time progresses, you can become numb to these feelings inside of you, numb to the fact that you carry 100kg of emotional baggage around with you. All experiences are diminished and where there should be joy, now there is only flatness.
There are so many competing positions on what response to take to the addict and so many routes the addict him/herself is encouraged/forced or made to follow. Often it can seem that no matter what the family or friend or sufferer does, it is never right. Someone else has another idea or another opinion. Daily there is an encounter with a feeling of hopelessness around ever finding a right way to manage the problem and so often it seems that life would be so much simpler if the addictive agency was just eradicated from the world; "If only the drug dealers were executed"; or "if only pornography was banned"; or "casinos closed"; or "bars shut down". If only they "cut up the credit cards" or had "the brothel closed". Yet the fact that you are here, reading this, means that hope for overcoming the problem is still present.
In this practice, addiction or addictive behaviours (and this can also include overeating, starvation, cutting or smoking, drugs or compulsive masturbation or sexual encounters), are all regarded as a behaviour. In one way or another, these behaviours, are a symptom of another underlying problem. My witness to the treatment of this symptom in its various forms has led me to understand that what lies beneath the behaviour is often, although not always, a specific place of emotional devastation, a place within the individual's emotional experience that is threatening and walled-off to the extent that he or she may not even know it exists, or if this place is known, he or she would rather use any means possible to avoid that inward encounter, so threatening is it felt to be.
Towards this end, therapy envisages the slow development of the emotional skills within the mind and being of the sufferer, through the experience of an ongoing supportive, non-judgmental and reflective therapeutic space. Relapses are not regarded as treatment failures in the context of a willing therapy participant. Instead these events are to be regarded as meaningful learning opportunities.
If you are struggling with addiction of any sort, then therapy is a powerful but long-term treatment tool. No matter where the addict is in the process of addiction the step to begin therapy is a declaration of the intention to overcome the problem.
Please submit your details on the Contact Form or call/Whatsapp the number provided (+27082 570 6499) or email [email protected]
Chances are if you are reading this page you - or someone you love - is struggling with addiction. If that is so, then I am glad you are here. Please, take a moment, before you read any further, just to notice how much weight you carry in yourself around this experience. Notice your mind - possibly restlessly searching and unable to rest - your breathing - possibly shallow. Perhaps there is also a looming feeling of dread, like a lump of clay in the back of your throat or the pit of your stomach, around what is to come and around what has already happened. This experience is common to those who surround the addict. What's worse, as time progresses, you can become numb to these feelings inside of you, numb to the fact that you carry 100kg of emotional baggage around with you. All experiences are diminished and where there should be joy, now there is only flatness.
There are so many competing positions on what response to take to the addict and so many routes the addict him/herself is encouraged/forced or made to follow. Often it can seem that no matter what the family or friend or sufferer does, it is never right. Someone else has another idea or another opinion. Daily there is an encounter with a feeling of hopelessness around ever finding a right way to manage the problem and so often it seems that life would be so much simpler if the addictive agency was just eradicated from the world; "If only the drug dealers were executed"; or "if only pornography was banned"; or "casinos closed"; or "bars shut down". If only they "cut up the credit cards" or had "the brothel closed". Yet the fact that you are here, reading this, means that hope for overcoming the problem is still present.
In this practice, addiction or addictive behaviours (and this can also include overeating, starvation, cutting or smoking, drugs or compulsive masturbation or sexual encounters), are all regarded as a behaviour. In one way or another, these behaviours, are a symptom of another underlying problem. My witness to the treatment of this symptom in its various forms has led me to understand that what lies beneath the behaviour is often, although not always, a specific place of emotional devastation, a place within the individual's emotional experience that is threatening and walled-off to the extent that he or she may not even know it exists, or if this place is known, he or she would rather use any means possible to avoid that inward encounter, so threatening is it felt to be.
Towards this end, therapy envisages the slow development of the emotional skills within the mind and being of the sufferer, through the experience of an ongoing supportive, non-judgmental and reflective therapeutic space. Relapses are not regarded as treatment failures in the context of a willing therapy participant. Instead these events are to be regarded as meaningful learning opportunities.
If you are struggling with addiction of any sort, then therapy is a powerful but long-term treatment tool. No matter where the addict is in the process of addiction the step to begin therapy is a declaration of the intention to overcome the problem.
Please submit your details on the Contact Form or call/Whatsapp the number provided (+27082 570 6499) or email [email protected]